Tags / 25 quotes from 11 sources
#philosophers
Can A Robot, An Insect Or God Be Aware?: Scientific American
Experimental philosophy: a new approach?
The study of consciousness (see here and here) has long played a crucial role in the discipline of philosophy, where facts about such intuitions form the basis for some complex and influential philosophical arguments. But, traditionally, the study of these intuitions has…
Exploring The Significance Of Digital Humanities For Philosophy | Digital Scholarship In The Humanities
Three possible reasons why DH hasn't thrived in philosophy yet
I think three more interesting possible explanations are that (1) philosophers are more methodologically skeptical than other humanities, (2) philosophers have long integrated computational methods in their work and so don’t need a revolution, and (3) the practice of philosophy…
From Encyclopedia To Ontology: Toward Dynamic Representation Of The Discipline Of Philosophy
Challenges in traditional metaphilosophical investigations; individual biases and limitations
Traditional methods for obtaining a description of the intellectual space of the discipline take the form of a less than a handful of philosophers testing each other's intuitions about ways to organize the content of the discipline. There are many reasons to be skeptical about…
Structural idea-types are used marginally
Information about the “idea type” is nonetheless useful for inferential purposes. For example, knowing whether an idea is of the type position or of the type distinction can constrain the types of relationships philosophers can have to it. The InPhO thus repre- sents this…
Ideas for a visualization system; open challenges for digital philosophy
Such a system would facilitate interaction with the encyclopedia for expert and novice users alike. Experts could see the “big picture” of an idea or philosopher in a glance, capturing a large amount of information in an efficient manner, and novices could surf through the…
Humans and computers work better together
A key challenge facing philosophers in the digital age is to discover how best to use computers to support our understanding of the discipline. As should be clear by now , we do not expect our text processing tools to write a compelling philosophy paper any time soon. Rather…
Stating something clearly won't stifle criticism, but rather encourage it
After all, it isn't like philosophers to allow standards or accepted truths to stifle such progress; in fact, the history of philosophy shows that stating something precisely and making it widely available is instead an invitation to more intelligent critique. Given the…
Inpho empirical advantages over traditional methods
Viewed against these challenges, our semi-automated approach may be thought to possess significant empirical advantages over this traditional method. Granted, our reliance on expert conceptualizations for the InPhO’s basic framework renders us vulnerable to some of these…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Experts and the public disagree about dualism
The philosophy of mind has a special feature that distinguishes it from other branches of philosophy. In most philosophical subjects there is no sharp division between what the professionals believe and the opinions of the educated general public. But on the issues discussed in…
Ontology
Ontology between realism and nominalism
Ontology, in analytic philosophy, concerns the determining of whether some categories of being are fundamental and asks in what sense the items in those categories can be said to "be". It is the inquiry into being in so much as it is being, or into beings insofar as they…
Ontology And Reification
Quine: ontology is what variables range over
Quine wrote that one's ontology coincides with the ranges of the variables in one's formalism. This usage is entirely appropriate for AI. Present philosophers, Quine perhaps included, are often too stingy in the reifications they permit. It is sometimes necessary to quantify…
Philosophy Engines: Technology And Reading/writing/thinking Philosophy
The shadow of the machine on philosophy
What account of intentionality, meaning and expressivity will be intuitive to practitioners of philosophy who use these technologies for accessing and analysing multiple electronic texts? What account of mind, self and morality will be intuitive to human readers grasping text…
The Book Of Dead Philosophers (critchley, Simon)
Socrates' daimon was an external sign
Socrates always claimed to follow his own daimon, what Cicero called a ‘divine something’: a personal god or spirit, what we might be inclined to think of as conscience. However, Socrates’ daimon was not some ‘inner voice’, but an external sign or command that would suddenly…
Death as a curative slumber
Having been condemned to death, Socrates concludes his speech with the following extraordinary words: Now it is time that we were going, I to die and you to live;but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God. These words encapsulate the classical…
Knowing when to walk out of the world
As Marcus Aurelius writes, it is one of ‘the noblest functions of reason to know whether it is time to walk out of the world or not’. Unknowing and uncertain, the philosopher walks.
Epicurus and the four-part cure
My own view of death is closer to that of Epicurus and what is known as the four-part cure: don’t fear God, don’t worry about death, what is good is easy to get and what is terrible is easy to endure. He writes in the final of the four extant letters attributed to him, Get used…
Disciples invent the master they want
Sadly, it is now almost universally assumed by classical scholars that Pythagoras never existed. It seems that there was a group of people in southern Italy called Pythagoreans who invented a ‘Founder’ for their beliefs who, accordingly, lived and died in a manner consistent…
Thoreau had never quarreled with God
Following a typical late-night excursion to count the rings on tree stumps during a rainy night, Thoreau contracted bronchitis. His health declined over the next three years and he seems to have been fully aware that his end was nigh and calmly accepted death. When asked if he…
The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Prickles versus goo
I have sometimes thought that all philosophical disputes could be reduced to an argument between the partisans of “prickles” and the partisans of “goo.” The prickly people are tough-minded, rigorous, and precise, and like to stress differences and divisions between things. They…
The Digital Nietzsche: Download Nietzsche's Major Works As Free Ebooks | Open Culture
Nietzsche on morality and society
It is “because of this origin,” writes the contrarian Nietzsche, “that the word ‘good’ is far from having any necessary connection with altruistic acts, in accordance with the superstitious belief of these moral philosophers.” Nietzsche described Christianity as “hostile to…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Locke and Reid aim at the wrong target
Although Reid’s objection hits the bullseye, in an important respect both he and Locke are looking at the wrong target.
Swinburne's dualism laid bare
Swinburne is not the only serious thinker to advocate the existence of non-material souls, of course. But he is one of the most eminent, and his account is one of the most systematic and thorough. His writings lay bare the logic of dualistic souls, and once exposed, its…
Origins of the bundle theory
Psychological connectedness and continuity is not the result of any core pearl of self that carries the continuity. Rather, this is sometimes called a ‘bundle theory’. The eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume was the first to use ‘bundle’ in this context, just once. His…
Kant's transcendental unity of apperception
Cassam follows in the footsteps of Immanuel Kant, who argued that for experience of the world to be possible, there has to be a fundamental unity within the subject of experience which allows the world to be perceived. Kant calls this the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’…
Ricoeur's great oscillation of the I
we must avoid what Paul Ricoeur called ‘the great oscillation that causes the “I” of the “I think” to appear, by turns, to be elevated inordinately to the heights of first truth and then cast down to the depths of a vast illusion’.